Many businesses market their products and services to consumers. Marketing provides an effective way for a business to increase its exposure to consumers, and many different programs exist to market products and services. For example, a business may advertise its products and services on radio, television, billboards, newspapers or other such mediums. In response to this marketing, consumers have greater exposure to the business's products and services, and they are more likely to purchase these advertised products and services than to purchase unadvertised products services from the business' competitors. This in turn generates increased sales and revenue for the business.
When different businesses advertise similar products, the competing advertisements may lose their effectiveness because a consumer may be unable to discern a noticeable difference that would warrant choosing one product over another product. For example, many different manufactures make mobile phones that can be used to access one or more different wireless telecommunication networks. The manufacturers generally engage in extensive advertising to generate brand loyalty and to differentiate their products from competitors' products, thereby prompting a consumer to buy their products. Similarly, service providers for the wireless networks often engage in extensive advertising to prompt a consumer to subscribe to their wireless network. The consumer may see the many available choices but have little reason to select one manufacturer or service provider over another. Thus, it would be beneficial to manufacturers and service providers to create an extra incentive for a consumer to select their products or services over a competitor's products or services.
Other industries have developed incentive programs in order to entice a consumer to select their products over a competitor's advertised products. For example, credit card companies use an incentive program in order to provide an extra incentive for a consumer to select credit cards for a particular company. In this type of a program a credit card company offers a credit card that includes a logo from one of a variety of different affinity partners, such as universities. The consumer can then select the logo of their favorite university to have on their particular card. In addition to providing a credit card with the logo, the credit card company also pays a rebate to the affinity partner for each purchase made using the credit card.
The rebate to the consumer's university provides an extra incentive for the consumer to obtain a credit card from the credit card company offering a card with the logo, because the consumer knows that purchases made using this card will benefit the consumer's university. Thus, the credit card company uses the consumer's school loyalty in order to promote its products over competing products. By exclusively licensing the right to use the university's logo, or by obtaining one of a small number of available licenses, the credit card company can offer a selection of different logos that are not available from competing companies. Other similar programs may pay a cash-back rebate directly to the consumer instead of using an affinity partner.